Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
A writer best known for novels including I'm the King of the Castle, Strange Meeting, The Bird of Night, and the acclaimed sequel Mrs. DeWinter.
On the island
Eight records
Soave sia il vento (from Così fan tutte)
This record is Mozart. It has to stand for all of Mozart.
Record number two is to remind me of my mother.
Nicholas Daniel and the Peterborough String Orchestra
It's easy to get melancholy. and I could see me on the island tipping over into the serious melancholia. So let's have the jolly bit of the Bellini.
Jacqueline du Pré with the London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Sir John Barbirolli
Record number four really links me very much to that time with David and the time I spent at Coffin Cathedral.
Tom BowlingFavourite
Peter Pears and Benjamin Britten
I must have Peter Peirce's voice, which I do think is one of the greatest tenors ever, and is my favourite singing voice, male singing voice and the two had this perfect collaboration musically.
One More Step Along the World I Go
The children of Botley Primary School, Oxford
This is very special, talking of children. Both my children were at Greycoats School in Oxford. And I've chosen? A favourite assembly hymn.
Night Covers Up the Rigid Land
Ian Bostridge, accompanied by Graham Johnson
It's Benjamin Britton's setting of a poem by W H Auden.
I decided the best of the Beatles in those early sixties was when they jumped on to the stage vibrating with energy and youth and vigour and cheerfulness
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:20Why is your writing such a secret process?
I prefer the word private to secret. Secret implies something guilty. I just cannot bear anyone to know anything at all about what's going on between me and the paper. While it's happening, it kills it.
Presenter asks
9:11How did you fall short of the kind of child your mother had in mind?
I think she wanted a very different daughter. She was a dressmaker of great talent, dress dress designer, very smart, neat, organized person. And she got this daughter who wasn't interested in clothes, who didn't want to be dressed up, who was bookish, solitary. solemn, serious, rather balshy, strong minded. She didn't know how to relate to me, except, of course, as a as a mother. She didn't understand me, I didn't understand her.
Presenter asks
14:00Why did you suddenly dry up [and stop writing novels] until you were in your late twenties?
Oh, I d I think I had to try up, because I was earning a living, running a double books page of a provincial newspaper every week, reading and reviewing absolutely everything, from mountaineering and gardening to children's books and novels. I hadn't got the creative energy and the time.
The keepsakes
The book
Nancy Mitford
I'm going to take a book which unfailingly makes me laugh. He's been a good companion to me in tight corners and at dark moments for thirty odd years. It's Nancy Mitford's The Pursuit of Love: The Great English. Humorous novel, but there's more to it than just a good laugh. Wonderful.
The luxury
I'd like to take the Barnes collection, please, um the great collection of Impressionist and Modern Paintings. a small fraction of which were brought to Europe and which I saw at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris a couple of years ago. Um but I want the whole Barnes collection from America, crated and shipped over. I think perhaps may I have one to arrive per day in a crate floated ashore by the time I got off the island if ever I do. I will have seen at close quarters more great pictures than anybody except Mr Barnes.
Presenter asks
15:09Do you think it's a particularly female condition that [motherhood saps creative energy]?
I think it is. Just inevitably, biologically, you are uh the person who is by nature required to devote all your energies to bearing and having your children. Writing serious fiction for me comes out of the same well. As the emotions I put into having my children, and you I couldn't do both together.
Presenter asks
24:05Why did you want to write about [the death of your baby Imogen] and make it public?
I think the writing of the book was for me. It was cathartic. There's no doubt about that. Having done it, I know absolutely certainly that the book was for other people. Simply my file of letters proves that to me.
“I have to have rock-solid confidence, which I always have during the writing. Absolutely. And the minute it's finished and I read it, it evaporates totally down a black hole. And I lose confidence in it entirely. I feel that it's the worst thing ever written.”
“I've never lost this feeling of being just not quite at one with everybody else.”
“You never come to terms with it. Um You don't accept the death of your own small child, your baby. You don't want it to have happened.”
“As I get older, silence and solitude become ever more important. And to have silence and solitude you have to do without the family, the friends, the companionship. But Curiously, it just gets to matter more and more and more.”